It was in a class on Japanese Buddhism that he encountered the Zen concept of mujo, or impermanence.* Sitting in his corner office on the thirty-fourth floor of a skyscraper in midtown Manhattan, Marks explains how this ancient idea has shaped his philosophy of investing and life. “Change is inevitable. The only constant is impermanence,” he says. “We have to accommodate to the fact that the environment changes. . . . We cannot expect to control our environment. We have to accommodate to our environment. We have to expect and go with change.”
